Danny Collins is a little movie with a big heart. The titular Danny Collins is a 70-something ex-rocker doing arena tours in which he performs his big hits for audiences of screaming middle-aged and senior citizen sufferers of nostalgia – but things might have been so much better if he’d only gotten the letter John Lennon wrote him forty years ago.

The Kids Are Alright is a 15-minute short film with a high-concept that feels artificially stretched into a full-length film. The movie is well acted but the characters feel like cardboard cutouts. The movie doesn’t believe in it’s own characters. The movie wants to be an open, honest exploration about what it’s like to have a non-traditional lesbian family – but it’s everything but that.

The dialog seems like it was pulled from a magazine full of bad liberal clichés. It feels as if people who used to be progressives, but want people to think they still are wrote this movie. Everyone sits around talking about composting, organic gardening, and being sperm donors but I never felt like there was conviction in any of these topics coming from director/writer Lisa Cholodenko. It’s never even explained what these things really mean. They are just hot “liberal” buzz words.

History is one of those subjects that can be made boring by a less than enthusiastic teacher – or by the misapprehension that it is, inherently, boring. In 2002 the DIC Entertainment Corporation produced a twenty-eight episode history of the United States of America as witnessed by four young people: Henri [voiced by Kathleen Barr], a young French boy whose parents died en route to The colonies and was forced into slavery to pay their passage; James [Chris Lundquist], a teenager whose passion for reporting and for the revolution are occasionally misdirected; Sarah [Reo Jones], recently arrived from England and incapable [at first] of believing that England’s Parliament could possibly enact legislation like unfair taxation, or quartering, and Moses [Kevin Williams], a young black man who works as an apprentice for Benjamin Franklin – and has first-hand experience with slavery.

Now, Shout!Factory has released the series on DVD and, as usual, have done a very nice job of it.

The twenty-eight episodes begin with The Boston Tea Party and carry through to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The writing is crisp and efficient; the viewpoint characters have sufficiently different backgrounds that each grows in different directions – while influencing each other; the animation is solid television work, and the various major historical figures are paired up with well known actors and newsmen.

Features: All discs: Midnight Ride Original Pencil Test; Ben Franklin’s Newsbytes; Continental Cartoons; Now and Then, and Mystery Guest Game; Disc 1: Midnight Ride Original Pencil Test; Disc 4: A Look Back at Liberty’s Kids With The Creators. Also included is a forty-page booklet that give episode titles and summaries, plus guest cast credits and the bonus features on each disc – and a two-sided fold-out poster [one side is a poster of the kids with Benjamin Franklin, the other a map of The Colonies alongside a list of the episode titles, the sites for which are marked on the map.